The potential for abuse by either oral or parenteral routes of narcotic and other psychoactive drugs is well known. For example, the potential for abuse of the synthetic narcotic drug fentanyl is so high that it has become a major cause of death for anesthesiologists and other hospital workers having access to the drug. In order to prevent abuse of these substances, it has been proposed to provide dosage forms which combine the abusable substance with an amount of an antagonist for the abusable substance sufficient to eliminate the "high" associated with abuse of the substance without eliminating the other therapeutic benefits for which the drugs are intended to be administered. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,457,933, 3,493,657 and 3,773,955 which are incorporated herein by reference.
Many abusable substances are capable of being administered to the body by direct application of the drug to the skin or mucosa, i.e., nasal, vaginal, oral, or rectal mucosa. They can also be delivered to the body from advanced dosage forms such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,655,766, 4,588,580, 3,993,073, and 3,845,770 which are incorporated herein by reference. Compositions suitable for topical application to the skin or for forming reservoir compositions in the advanced dosage forms described above could be subject to abuse, and it would clearly be desirable to have such compositions or dosage forms available in a condition in which the abuse potential of the composition or dosage form is reduced without diminishing the therapeutic efficacy of the abusable substance to be administered.
It is, accordingly, an object of this invention to provide a composition of matter for topical application of an abusable substance to the body, which composition has a low potential for abuse.
It is another object of this invention to provide a dosage form for the therapeutic administration of an abusable substance, which dosage form has a low potential for abuse.
It is another object of this invention to provide a transdermal dosage form of an abusable substance having a low potential for abuse.
It is a further object of this invention to provide methods for administering abusable substances to the body from compositions and devices having a low potential for abuse.